A somewhat contentious subject sometimes but being another thread sort of side-swiped the matter I thought I'd ask.

I have one very, very close encounter that you can take or leave in the tale below, it happened about four decades ago and I still just do not have a clue what it was. However in the rather small community of pilots and particularly fighter pilots you will not find many who dismiss the existence of strange flying objects. What startled me more when I told this tale to my dad, one of the few in my family who ever knew the crap I used to get up to was that he had seen some really strange things in his life, including a classic cigar shaped mothership and attendant flying saucers over the ruins of a West Country castle. He had someone with him, it happened back in the sixties and I'd never doubt a thing my dad told me.

My story, hmm, I did tell it years back in the green place and after so many years I might sort of embellish, but will try to keep it straight

I guess everyone knows I used to fly fighters, this happened during the time that I was on Phantoms, F-4s, out of Lossiemouth, which was actually the only time I ever flew two-seat, fortunately I had one great GiB, Brian, superb at his job and he was with me when this happened. That does not help the veracity of the story, he was killed doing his job a couple of years later when the pilot he was with made a horrendous mistake and flew them into a hill in Germany.

The way it came about was this:

Most of the time the F-4s at Lossie were on QRA, Quick Reaction Alert, in the Cold War days that meant being ready to launch at short notice to intercept Russian bombers snooping around, usually Tupolev Bears, sometimes other types. It was just a weird game really, they were sort of probing around and we always caught them at it, many stories could be told of hitting on the Bears

However the F-4 was owned by the RAF because it was a multi-role aircraft and we were expected to remain proficient in more than bouncing commies so every few weeks I'd find myself scheduled to do a ground attack run.

That varied, a bit, but mostly it was a low-level sortie to the west to a bomb range that I only realised years afterward was very close to Machrihanish, an airbase that has been associated with the Aurora mystery.

So we headed off on a remarkably fine day by Scottish standards, some cloud but not raining and went low very quickly tracking through a series of valleys at around 400 knots. We knew the route pretty well by then so were relaxed, just holding track.

Up ahead was a saddle which can be a bit of a trap for young players wanting to stay off of any radar screens, which was the intent of this exercise, if you simply climb to pass through you will very likely pop up higher than you mean to and get pinged. Most pilots would instead roll inverted and pull through the gap, easier to control but myself I was pretty much at the top of my game on the F-4 by then, I treated it as a barrel-roll with the top of the roll being just on the cusp of the saddle, other than the world rotating around you that was a very comfortable way to go, 1 G all the way.

Except this time as we came over the top we were suddenly faced by what seemed like a wall of shiny silver metal...

That can wake you up.... also make you swear whilst pulling hard left and kicking rudder, being on a knife edge, to not impact with the ground, which the wingtip did come frighteningly close to.

As I pulled us level and up, looking to get back in the groove by pure reflex I did snatch one look back, as did Brian.

It was then that I knew we were not going to be reporting this, not if we didn't want to get grounded and sent of for psych eval.

Behind us was a large silver cigar shaped, something, craft I suppose, seemingly hanging in the valley but not for long, in a blink it was gone, straight up and punching a hole in the overcast, a wide one, that was the way it rose...

Back on track I hauled in a deep breath and said:

"Ok, tell me you saw it as well."

"I sure did, but just what I saw, no fucking idea."

We kicked it back and forth for a minute or two but we still had a mission to do and there is not much time for chatter down this low, so we shut up. I did think about scratching but then we'd have to explain why and I really did not think we would be doing that.

Somehow we still managed a reasonable score on the range then transited in near silence at high altitude back to base. About the only conversation was an agreement to not bother reporting what we were having trouble believing ourselves.

We mulled over it in the bar that evening but could come no closer to understanding it than we had been in the seconds of the encounter, beyond that is that both of us had read about the UFO motherships, this fit the description to a T.

Over the next couple of years we'd bring it up from time to time, then Brian was killed and apart from sometimes mentioning it in the company of pilot friends I've only ever told my dad, and years ago Atomic, until now that is

What was it ?

I have absolutely no idea, it was I'm sure solid, I've never seen a balloon that shape nor one that could move as fast as it did. Brian was a bit of a maths nut, he found out the height of the cloud cover that day and guesstimated how long it took to get there, from that he calculated that it had accelerated from stationary to around Mach 3, instantly. That actually fit with what I saw but it hardly helps explain any better.

The only terrestrial possibility we then or myself over the years ever came up with was some very, very deep black project that has never seen the light of day. Given some of the very odd rumours that surface every now and again about Machrihanish and the surrounding area it is possible.

You fly boys get to see all the good shit.I did see an orb once, Not just me but four of us in a car traveling down the princes highway on a clear night .We were about eighteen years of age and driving between Nowra and Conjola at night down to our caravan when a torso sized orb of light rushed past our little galant, Kind of hovered right in front of us and doing the same 100 klm speed then hit the ground and bounced away at light speed. It took off like hot moulted metal bouncing away from a struck forge. Freaked the shit out of us.We all thought it was a ghost the way it hung in front of us and keeping the same speed then fucked off. Later I learned of bouncing lightning balls and that may explaine it. But to this day none of us can explain how it SLOWED down to 100KLM ?

Some people would say we hallucinate the shit Smokey but pilots do report seeing a lot of very odd things.

Orbs are a very well established form of UFO and probably do not have just one explanation.

What you saw does not quite meet the most often reached to explanation which is ball lightning, a phenomenon that was denied for decades but is now pretty much accepted as being a peculiar but not that unusual in occurrence manifestation of plasma.

I have a friend in Sydney whose dad used to fly for El Al, told me once of having a ball of "lightning" appear in the cockpit of a 707, actually probably a 720, that he was flying trans-atlantic on a stormy night. By his report it just popped into existence and began to drift to the rear of the aircraft. He said it did not seem like a good idea to argue with it so he opened the door and down the aisle it went until in "grounded" down in the rear galley area which coincided with a bunch of breakers needing to be reset in the cockpit, so probably an electrical phenomenon.

The very interesting incidents of "Foo Fighters" reported in all theaters in the latter half of WWII have similarities to what you describe. Those are plain weird, can be seen in a few photographs, are recorded in a lot of testimonies from before reporting such things was discouraged because in that era all sides thought it was a "secret weapon." Perhaps it was, the Nazis got up to some damned strange shit.

The funny thing with Foos is that they do not seem to have re-appeared in subsequent conflicts, but they were most markedly a wartime aerial phenomenon.

On the other hand right here in Australia out on the Nullabor plain scarcely a year seems to go by that someone doesn't report something similar to your account, or something more akin to Foos.

I tend to think they probably are natural phenomena but just by what mechanism is not easy to define.

The thing with UFOs is that a great many of them probably are able to be explained - they are the visual equivalent to an audio phenomenon that is well understood where anyone can completely misinterpret the lines of a song because our brains always try to apply patterns and the same is true of visual information. However when two or more witnesses report the same thing it becomes much more difficult to explain away and that is the case with quite a few UFO sightings.

It does not help of course that there are many examples of fakes, photos of hub caps tossed in the air, or that for whatever reason many governments either suppress UFO information or go to outlandish lengths to explain them away.

The most famous example of that is the US' "Project Blue Book" not very convincing I have to say but the most amusing one is from the UK where a couple of RAF guys on night duty in a tower were censured for making a report that made it to the media of night sky objects doing strange things because they observed it through a government owned window

Something, or more likely somethings are behind these way too often reported incidents and I'd be certain that a lot of them are undisclosed experiments, mostly military, but I'm yet to be convinced that is the only explanation.

I was a 1st year apprentice mechanic, a country lad working and living in the big smoke in Sydney. A cold clear Thursday night saw us off to the pub for cheap beer night and after 5 or 6 schooners we were merrily making our way through the back streets to our digs.

We stopped off at the local footy field in Ashfield for a spell and a ciggy as they had an open air grandstand. Having a smoke and kicking back in the seat I was staring up into the sky when I saw a cluster 6 or 7 white lights and 3 blue ones at an altitude I guestimated to be 20,000 - 30,000 feet. At that height and at night all I could really distinguish (I had 30/20 vision back then no bull) was the lights and no shapes to the craft. At first they circled and swirled and danced in the sky for a little while before going crazy, blinding acceleration and making impossible high speed right angle turns and zig zags over roughly 20 degrees of my vision.

Next thing they scattered. Most flew straight upwards at incredible speed until their light dimmed to nothing in mere seconds and a couple took off at weird tangents at the same speed.

From go to woah lasted roughly 3 minutes.

Luckily my mate had witnessed the entire thing as well and the papers reported sightings from all over Sydney the next day.

I remember that, Didn't see it but I too was a 1st year apprentice locksmith in 1985 at a factory at Arncliff and I remember the hulalaboo on the floor. back then we were so much more closed minded and those that claimed they saw lights had eyes rolled at them

I'm not sure we are really much less closed minded now to be honest Smokey, especially the younger generations.

There seems to have been a bit of a reverse effect from movies such as Close Encounters, which is hardly new and Men In Black etc that has people sort of inclined to ignore anything much out of the ordinary in the skies.

Close Encounters actually used known events in the early scenes to set the stage but try telling that to most movie goers. Not that Flight 19 has ever re-appeared but the number of anomalous civilian airliner sightings and ATC radar tracks of by definition UFOs is more than significant.

Somewhat to the bemusement of my friends I'm not much of a believer in Little Green Men etc but I keep an open mind, there are just too many instances on record and God alone knows how many that go unreported.

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